97. You will always remember what came hard and mostly forget what came easy.

As I arrive at this point of the book, I have begun to realize that there is a risk I am taking. Meaning, as I try to provide Tools that I believe are necessary to help you reach your goals, I may ruffle some feathers along the way. The dilemma of sounding like Mr. Perfect and a know-it-all can really turn people off. Let me reassure you, I am working on myself as much as you are trying to do. The reason I found it necessary to explain myself is because most of those falling short of goals do so because they seem too hard to reach. I believe this is a great starter Tool because if you use this to start any project, it will make you understand that building the life of your dreams is hard work.

You will understand that as you look at the life you have built, you will remember the most the areas that took the most effort. Understanding this crucial principle of building will hopefully motivate you to gravitate to the toughest of challenges and avoid the easiest of paths. It’s easy to keep this Tool short and sweet. I bet you can name three things right now that you had to work, claw and scratch for. It will take you time to remember the things that required little effort. There is a risk that comes with setting your goals too low, you just might hit them.

101. The will to win is nothing compared to the will to prepare to win.

Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. Oh what, you truly believe that some people are lucky and some aren’t? Even though statistics can’t prove everything, people will reference them to explain how luck exists. The truth is most people who are lucky set themselves up to be lucky. Translated, most people who get good fortune set themselves up to win. The two principles involved here are that “lucky” people don’t always advertise the Tools they use to get lucky.

Second, the people who aren’t “lucky” don’t do what lucky people are doing. Also, they affirm what they are not doing by cursing the “lucky” guy or gal. Just by the simple fact that you acknowledge people are lucky or not adds strength to the premise that the universe favors some over others. So with that said, what is more likely? Some people are just RANDOMLY lucky, or the people who put in the necessary work are more likely to be lucky? While random luck happens once or twice, someone who is lucky is doing something that allows that to happen more frequently. At least concede to me you have a better chance of getting in the show if you try to buy a ticket. Meaning, you have a better chance for luck with some preparation.

Successful people for the most part simply work smarter and harder than those who don’t. Harder in my opinion means working on it every day. Smarter only means you have a system in place that will increase the likelihood of success. So what this all means is preparing to win must be done daily and systematically. All the components in your blueprint comprise those aspects made in this statement.

I will give you a classic example. It is common knowledge that Jerry Rice is the greatest football receiver of all time. It can be well argued that he may have been the best player in the history of football. His talent was so acknowledged to be the best by miles over his closest rivals, it is well accepted his will to win would have been enough to make him the best. The interesting thing about Jerry Rice is that it is also well accepted that he trained off the field harder than maybe anyone in the history of football. His will to prepare was almost greater than his will to win.

Time and time again I see people who think they can just turn it on when needed. This is not what the most successful people do. If you want a successful life, defined by what success means to you, it is a daily ritual of habits and attitudes that must be applied daily. If you want it bad enough, you have to be willing to put in more work when people aren’t watching than when people are. This is the mark of a true champion. Jerry Rice did 99% of his best work when no one was even in the stands.

We all do it. I do it. We do it so much we don’t even realize we’re doing it. Gossip is deeply intertwined in our daily fabric and almost impossible to avoid. What is under our control is how we choose to engage in this almost inevitable ritual of daily life. The first thing to identify is why we gossip. We gossip because it is much easier to talk about the lives of others than to work on our own lives.

Gossip makes our shortcomings more tolerable, but in doing so does little to improve our own situation. We can change this by making gossip a positive interaction. Meaning, if we can flip gossip from being a session of focusing on the negative aspects of others to defending or offering other perspectives to a situation, we can enhance the possibility or probability of making a gossip session a positive session.

There are many advantages to approaching gossip in this manner. By making an effort to make gossip a positive event, you may influence the perception that others have of you. If people perceive you as finding the best of a bad situation, it will definitely increase your ability of personal success. This Tool will also help you. By mentally making the effort to not find the worst in others’ situations, you will increase your ability to work on finding solutions to your present challenges. By now you must have the understanding that there is overlap in many of these Tools and it is almost impossible to avoid how they are intertwined. Shortly, you will discover Tool 100, Focus on yourself. In making an effort to avoid gossip or making it as positive as possible, you enable yourself to accomplish both.

Lastly, we are doing our best to become hammers and build our own project. We can’t build what our blueprint calls for when we are constantly focusing on the flaws of someone else’s. If you would like to increase the value of the home you are trying to build, it would only stand to reason to help your neighbor build their house as well. Those in history who are defined as leaders and winners have earned that title by helping those not able to help themselves.

WARNING: This Tool is hard to use and can cause injury while learning how to master. This is one of the hardest to master in the book and simply the attempt to use it shows a great effort on your part. While I believe we can almost never master the art of this piece of equipment, I know it can never work until you decide to pick it up. Sometimes you will use it quite well and other times you will forget that you even have it in the bag. Using it may cause you to lose some friends and family who don’t believe it even works. Proceed with caution understanding many have never even seen it. To even choose to use a Tool of this magnitude will require both a little courage and some sanding against the grain. A secret that can make this Tool easier to use is to believe that courage can be defined by helping those that can’t (or aren’t present) to defend themselves. Making gossip positive carries the same weight as standing up to a bully.